


Nightmare

by sunflowerspaceman



Series: Sympathy for the Devil [7]
Category: Eddsworld - All Media Types
Genre: Amputation, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eye Trauma, Gore, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-06-14 23:34:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15400056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunflowerspaceman/pseuds/sunflowerspaceman
Summary: Tord has some trauma nightmares, and Tom calms him down.





	Nightmare

_ Choking on copper. Burning. Twisted metal trapping him. _

_ Can’t move and everything feels like it’s getting smaller, crushing him. _

_ Metal distorting, shaping, turning into a familiar face. Faces. _

_ Yuu. Choking. Gurgling. No words. Just monstrous death rattles, dead eyes, jaw slack and hanging open, oil dripping down his face. Or it seems to be, till some gets in his mouth and he realizes it’s blood. _

_ Edd, looking demonic as his expression twists into hatred and hurt. He screams and sobs, full of fury, a raw noise, and he knows it’s because of him that he’s doing that but he can’t move to comfort or shut Edd up no matter how hard he tries. _

_ Matt, hurt and scared, flinching at the sight of him. _

_ Tom, fuel hose wrapped around his neck like a noose, face gaunt and ghostly and haunted like when Tord came back the second time. He’s slurring out broken phrases in the flavor of “Almost killed me. All your fault. Could’ve been dead, ‘cause of you.”  _

_ The twisted metal imitation of Tom reaches out, and drags the sharp edges of his hand down his face, and he can feel it hitting muscle, hitting bone, slicing his eye open, and then a pain worse than he’s ever felt hits him and he realizes Tom is taking his arm.  _

_ All of them are, eight metal hands grabbing his arm and he can see the flesh tearing, the tendons snapping, muscle ripping apart, blood gushing out.  _

_ He can’t scream. _

_ He can’t move. _

_ He can just watch.  _

_ Tom looks at him. _

_ “Tord.” _

_ He can’t respond.  _

_ “Tord!” _

_ What is he doing? _

“TORD!”

He snaps awake and he’s already thrashing, he still can’t move, why can’t he  _ move _ —

“Tord, I need you to calm down.” Tom’s voice, steady and clear, a hand on his shoulder, and he stops thrashing, still shaking with fear as two people he feels he should recognize are untangling him. His panic ridden brain can only focus on one thing, remember one person and that’s Tom, his Tom, still alive and here and murmuring words of comfort as the two familiar strangers work to free him.

Suddenly he’s tumbling to the ground, body automatically going limp. Slender fingers card through his hair, and he hears Tom speak. “Paul, Pat, I’ll take it from here,” he says. 

Tord can’t breathe. He’s letting out air but nothing is coming back in, and panic starts to blind him again and his hands come to claw at his throat—

But then they’re being pulled away, and he’s sitting up, and his face is buried in Tom’s shoulder now and he smells different than he did all those years ago but Tord can still smell Smirnoff and the smokey remnants of his aftershave and his shampoo. 

Tord finds those bits and pieces of the past comforting. Enough to push past the scent of gunsmoke that clings to them both now, too deeply soaked into their skin and their clothes and everything they own to escape. 

Before he knows it he’s crying. Subdued at first, subtle, but after a bit it becomes loud, ugly sobs, unmarred remains of his face blotchy and red and contorted with pain and sorrow and covered in snot and tears. His prosthetic is on the nightstand so when he clings to Tom it’s almost painful because he can feel his hand clinging too tight but he can’t let go, won’t let go, because if he lets go this will all turn out to be a dream and he’ll be sent back into hell, back into the battlefield, back into bitter wars with ugly people. 

He wishes Tom would kill him, sometimes. That the Tom he’d expected to greet him when he came back that second time would be a reality. It would mean he was right. That he should be put out of his misery. Because for all his posturing, he trusted Tom. Trusted him to make that decision. Wanted him to. Knew he’d be right if he did.

His mind is everywhere and nowhere all at once and certainly not on earth but he’s brought back down when he hears Tom call his name and it’s soft, and gentle, and all the harshness and bite normally present in Tom is gone, and he’s wiping Tord’s tears away but Tord starts crying hard again and he feels Tom holding him and god he can’t breathe again. 

His mind shifts to how he’s almost lost this, lost this anchor, his grounding point, too many times. He counts them—one, two, three, four, five. One, under the rubble of their shared home, two, with a rope around his neck that obviously failed, three, cancer, four, captured in the field, five, a bullet almost in his brain. It was five times too many, and then more panic hits him when he realizes there may have been more, an uncountable number of times in the field, and in the 8 year span he was gone, and god, he wouldn’t have known until it was too late. Or at all. He finds the latter much more terrifying. 

He can’t breathe. 

He comes back to himself being put into his bed, and someone climbing in next to him. Tom’s scent washes over him and his slender arms wrapping around him and Tord just goes limp, hiccuping silently. Tom starts murmuring to him again, and Tord starts memorizing the details of his face because the more he does the more he feels calmness seeping into him. 

Tom is safe. They’re all safe.

He rests his head on Tom’s chest, eye starting to droop closed. 

He’s safe.

No one is trying to take his arm again. He’s not hurt. Not in the robot, not in the heat of battle. He’s in bed, with Tom, the man he loves even if he can’t tell him properly.

“Jeg elsker deg.” He mutters. He’s too exhausted to think about the implications of what he just said. Tom can’t understand him anyway.

Instead he lets his eye shut completely. For the first time in years he feels secure and safe while he tries to sleep. When Tom starts carding through his hair again, he’s out like a light.

(When he wakes up the next day, still in Tom’s arms, Paul and Pat will have had him put on leave for three days.)

(He won’t be able to find it in himself to complain.) 


End file.
